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A court in Chad has sentenced former prime minister and opposition leader Succès Masra to 20 years in prison after finding him guilty of hate speech, xenophobia, and inciting a massacre that claimed 42 lives.
Naija News reports that the court in the capital, N’Djamena, handed down the verdict on Saturday, convicting Masra, one of President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno’s most outspoken critics, for his alleged role in provoking inter-communal violence on May 14, which left mostly women and children dead in Mandakao, southwestern Chad.
Prosecutors had sought a 25-year sentence. Masra’s trial came alongside nearly 70 others accused of participating in the killings, which authorities said stemmed from a dispute between ethnic Fulani herders and Ngambaye farmers over grazing and farming boundaries.
Lead defence lawyer Francis Kadjilembaye condemned the ruling, describing it as politically motivated.
“Our client has just been the object of a humiliation,” Kadjilembaye told AFP.
“He has just been convicted on the basis of an empty dossier, on the basis of assumptions and in the absence of evidence. What we had witnessed was the weaponisation of the courts.”
Masra’s party, Transformers, said it would issue a “special message” in response to the judgment.
Masra was arrested on May 16, two days after the violence, and charged with inciting hatred, revolt, forming and complicity with armed gangs, complicity in murder, arson, and desecration of graves.
His lawyers insisted no concrete evidence was presented against him. They also revealed he went on a hunger strike for nearly a month in June while in detention.
A trained economist in France and Cameroon, Masra rose to prominence as a staunch opponent of Chad’s ruling authorities.
He fled the country after a 2022 crackdown on his supporters, only returning under a 2024 amnesty deal.
In a surprising political turn, he was appointed prime minister in January 2024, serving until May that year, five months before the presidential election.
Running against Déby, Masra secured 18.5% of the vote against the president’s 61.3%, but controversially claimed victory.
The May 14 killings form part of a wider pattern of deadly clashes between nomadic herders and sedentary farmers in Chad.
The International Crisis Group estimates that such conflicts have caused over 1,000 deaths and 2,000 injuries between 2021 and 2024.
Masra, from the Ngambaye ethnic group in Chad’s south, remains a popular figure among the predominantly Christian and animist communities who have long accused the Muslim-dominated government in N’Djamena of marginalisation.
The post Hate Speech: Former Prime Minister Sentenced To 20 Years In Prison In Chad appeared first on Naija News.
